Telehealth

The Challenge

In-person care can be inconvenient for patients and caregivers, and in many clinical situations is just not necessary. It can be frustrating for patients to take time off from work, drive to one of our practices, find parking and sit in an exam room for a problem that could have been resolved without a traditional visit. What’s more, when these barriers prevent providers from meeting patients where they are and delivering the right care at the right time, quality can suffer alongside experience.

Our Solution

At Brigham and Women's, we implement programs that strive to make care more accessible and convenient for our patients. Many of our practices now offer new, technology-driven visit types to bring care to the patient, and not the other way around. We offer two types of telehealth visits to our patients:

eVisits, using clinical questionnaires based on common symptoms, found on our patient portal and delivered directly to our providers when completed

We also offer eConsults, which allow providers to send questions to one another through our EMR and can lead to fewer unnecessary referrals (and fewer visits for patients); when a referral is necessary, eConsults enable our patients to be better prepared to see our specialist providers.

Results to date

eVisits: We offer eVisits across many of our primary care practices, and are planning to expand to specialty practices this year.

eConsults: Most of our primary care providers are active users of eConsults, which are accepted by nearly all of our specialty departments at BWH.

Virtual Visits: Our virtual visit volume continues to grow steadily as more Brigham and Women's providers have started offering this new technology.

To perform a virtual visit with your provider at Brigham Health, you will need reliable internet access, as well as one of the following devices:

PC: Windows 7 or later with webcam

Mac: OS X Yosemite (v10.10) or later with webcam

Tablets: iPad (iOS 8.1 or later), Android (4.1 or later)

Mobile Phones: iPhone (iOS 8.1 or later), Android (4.1 or later)

Contact your provider office to learn more about virtual visits. If you are a patient and have scheduled a virtual visit with your provider, please ensure that you carefully read the setup email and perform your initial test call. Please contact the Brigham Virtual Care Team by email at BrighamVirtualCare@partners.org with any questions you may have about setting up the program.